(Madeira, Portugal – June 22, 2009) – Governments from more than 80 countries opened the 61st annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in Madeira today (Mon), following a year of closed-door discussions which have failed to secure agreement from Japan, Iceland and Norway to respect the body’s scientific procedures and commercial whaling ban.

Conservation-minded delegates to
the week-long meeting said much is at stake for whales and decades of
international efforts to protect them.

Patrick Ramage, whale programme
director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), said: “Our
planet’s great whales face more threats today than at any time in history. It’s
time to get rid of commercial whaling, not the whaling ban.”

An IWC moratorium on commercial
whaling came into effect in 1986. Since that time, the government of
Japan has killed some 12,000 whales,
abusing a provision in the convention which permits whaling for scientific
research purposes.

A major focus of this week’s
meeting is a proposed deal to sanction unsustainable coastal whaling by
Japan in exchange for a reduction in
its ongoing “scientific” whaling in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. Such a
deal would violate the moratorium and established scientific procedures,
legitimise Japan’s ongoing “scientific” whaling
and ignore decades of work by the IWC Scientific Committee.

“Countries that support sound
science and whale conservation should reject this deal and instead take action
inside and outside the IWC to make the commercial whaling moratorium effective,”
Ramage added. “The future of the IWC is conservation science, not commercial
slaughter.”

A new IFAW report to be released
during the Madeira meeting documents the
continuing dramatic growth and expanding economic contribution of whale watching
worldwide.